SUNSET AND SAWDUST
I just finished Joe Lansdale's rip-roaring character study of one of the most convincing and charming ass-kicking women I've encountered in a long time: SUNSET AND SAWDUST. I can't resist posting (or attempting to post) an image of the cover and I hope it's not monstrously huge. It's a beautiful, sexy and dusted dustjacket, and one of the most-appropriate-to-the-book covers I've come across in awhile.
How can you pass up the promise of that cover?
I've got a real weakness as a reader, and a writer, for the odd metaphor and simile, especially those delivered with the deft touch of irony and Lansdale is a master at spinning phrases into gold here. The prose is fluid and sharp at the same time, full of twists and turns on a sentence by sentence level. The plot ticks along and manages to be surprising, mostly, but here's the real hat trick. In a murder mystery, you want surprise, right? But in the few places where I as a reader am waiting for a surprise and don't get one, or where something happens as I thought, the writing is so good and glides the moment right into someplace else, someplace better and deeper, that I don't mind at all. That is a magician's touch at work.
The bad guys are really, really bad, but mostly they're just a sideline to the real show, which is the book's women, led by Sunset (so named for her fire-engine hair) who opens the book by killing her husband and is quickly taken under her mother-in-law's protective wing. That's all I'll say about the plot and doesn't give away anything you wouldn't learn in a page or three. Oh, except to note that there's a surprising environmental element that gives the climax a special, almost biblical quality.
A fun, zippy read that manages to be more than that -- to add something to the western genre even though it technically isn't one. SUNSET AND SAWDUST's involving in the same way a great movie is, and it's so chock full of excellent dialogue and even more excellent characters that a girl can hope that someday it will be. Just let's pray they don't cast Nicole Kidman as Sunset. Anybody can have red hair in Hollywood, people.
How can you pass up the promise of that cover?
I've got a real weakness as a reader, and a writer, for the odd metaphor and simile, especially those delivered with the deft touch of irony and Lansdale is a master at spinning phrases into gold here. The prose is fluid and sharp at the same time, full of twists and turns on a sentence by sentence level. The plot ticks along and manages to be surprising, mostly, but here's the real hat trick. In a murder mystery, you want surprise, right? But in the few places where I as a reader am waiting for a surprise and don't get one, or where something happens as I thought, the writing is so good and glides the moment right into someplace else, someplace better and deeper, that I don't mind at all. That is a magician's touch at work.
The bad guys are really, really bad, but mostly they're just a sideline to the real show, which is the book's women, led by Sunset (so named for her fire-engine hair) who opens the book by killing her husband and is quickly taken under her mother-in-law's protective wing. That's all I'll say about the plot and doesn't give away anything you wouldn't learn in a page or three. Oh, except to note that there's a surprising environmental element that gives the climax a special, almost biblical quality.
A fun, zippy read that manages to be more than that -- to add something to the western genre even though it technically isn't one. SUNSET AND SAWDUST's involving in the same way a great movie is, and it's so chock full of excellent dialogue and even more excellent characters that a girl can hope that someday it will be. Just let's pray they don't cast Nicole Kidman as Sunset. Anybody can have red hair in Hollywood, people.
posted by Gwenda @ 5/17/2004 09:42:00 PM
1 Comments:
At 10:09 PM ,
Rob Smith said...
I loved the book too. The action scene between Sunset's dad and Hobo was excellent. Mr. Lansdale just does so many things well in this book. He is never heavy handed in his representation of racial intolerance or any of the other issues he deals with in his book. Have you read "The Bottoms"?
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